Jindal followed the trolling with a campaign t-shirt along similar lines

Jindal is no stranger to a weird saga of cognitive dissonance related to skin color. His official portrait resembles Scott Walker, another one of his fellow 23% of Americans afflicted with “running for GOP candidate for presidency” disease.

Bonus: Jindal’s Twitter bio cover has his photo with the homophobic Robertsons of Duck Dynasty fame. I can only conjecture this serves to further his “tanned” credentials.

Though the election is still more than a year away, a survey of Republican voters found more voters would prefer Jindal not run (20 percent) than favor his candidacy (14 percent).

Recent events in America have made us question the traditional notion of gender, sexuality and even, race, with the term transracial gaining some airtime because of a certain Rachel Dolezal. I don’t feel I’m qualified enough to judge the validity of the term and whether Bobby Jindal could qualify as transracial. However, given his love for tanning and his hatred for hyphenation, I feel comfortable anointing him:

Bobby Jindal, the first Tansracial-American.

*On a side note: I do not approve of Bobby Jindal running for any public office at any level. I approve this message.

And Betteridge’s Law may not hold the answer, in this case. You make the call after reading this post.

A few days back, I tweeted out something I noticed when checking out the new Google Maps – the Indian states of Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh were entirely listed as dotted lines (See below) instead of solid, indicating Google considered them, at best, disputed territories, and at worst, not part of India.

My limited understanding of international politics notwithstanding, I know that most maps these days split Kashmir in 3, to indicate regions controlled by India, and the ones not controlled by India. Additionally, the state of Arunachal Pradesh has been a point of contention between India and China for the better part of the last century. So, my assumption was that Google Maps was reflecting the same.

However, after a brief interaction over Twitter, my findings are as follows: Google Maps displays the state of Arunachal Pradesh as disputed territory (image on left) when you access it from the US (and perhaps, the rest of the world) but when you access Google Maps from India, the state of Arunachal Pradesh is shown as an integral part of India (image on right).

This post is not intended to stir “patriotic fervor” between Indians, Pakistanis and the Chinese but rather to encourage a discussion on how big technology companies are starting to indulge in politics, at an international level. Please feel free to add to this discussion in the comments space below.

Ramachandra Guha performs a colonoscopy of sorts on the close-minded, anti-intellectual, cliche-riddled, demagoguery that passes for the ideology of the Hindu extremist outfit, the RSS. [Telegraph] (via @pragmatic_d on Twitter)

It’s a fascinating read with real-life accounts from former RSS-ers and includes some hilarious points, for instance, what was the RSS’s stand during the Quit India movement?

However, the portion that stood out to me most:

“Hindus have lived in India since time immemorial; Hindus are the nation because all culture, civilization and life is contributed by them alone; non-Hindus are invaders or guests and cannot be treated as equal unless they adopt Hindu traditions, culture etc…; the history of India is the history of the struggle of the Hindus for protection and preservation of their religion and culture against the onslaught of these aliens; the threat continues because the power is in the hands of those who do not believe in this nation as a Hindu Nation; those who talk of national unity as the unity of all those who live in this country are motivated by the selfish desire of cornering minority votes and are therefore traitors; the unity and consolidation of the Hindus is the dire need of the hour because the Hindu people are surrounded on all sides by enemies; the Hindus must develop the capacity for massive retaliation and offence is the best defence; lack of unity is the root cause of all the troubles of the Hindus and the Sangh is born with the divine mission to bring about that unity.”

Replace “Hindus” with “White Christians”, “India” with “USA” and “non-Hindus” with “immigrants”,”Muslims” or “any other minority group” in the above paragraph and you have the template of a conservative talk show host in the US. Fascinating, huh?

Finally, the elections are over. I for one am very thankful that my nightly TV watching is not interrupted by moronic ads in which politicians on both sides try to outdo each other in demonizing their opponents- complete with unflattering photos and rhetoric that comes close to slander.

Nikki Haley made history by becoming the first female Indian-American Governor in the USA. Now we will have two serving Governors of Indian origin , as she joins Bobby Jindal ( who you can see in the flesh elsewhere on this site !).

This election was historic for desis as we had a record number of desi origin candidates in the fray

At the time of writing neither Raj Goyle of Kansas nor Manan Trivedi in California was going to make it. Raj Goyle ’s opponent had billboards up urging voters to “Vote American” in an obviously bigoted attempt at questioning Goyle’s American-ness based on his ethnicity. If nothing else: this election is good in that it reminds us how far the community has to go before we can truly be considered a viable politically influential group.

We went through this soul-searching the last time round when Bobby Jindal was elected. While I may not agree with any of his positions, it still felt good to know that someone out there was opening doors for Indian Americans. I realized I do not need to endorse a candidate in order to celebrate their success.

Just because I am fed up with being the resident anti – sexist, anti – objectification blogger, I present in all his glory our very own Bobby Jindal. This is part of a truly tasteless Vanity Fair “Red Meat” calendar featuring GOP men in various,photoshopped states of undress. On a serious note: I completely disapprove of this. Imagine if they had tried this with GOP women,I would have been the first to cry “Foul”!